Parking policy as an instrument for reducing passenger cars’ harmful emissions

Abstract

Passenger car related harmful gas emissions have become one of the most significant problems that cities worldwide are facing during the last thirty years. One of the approaches to harmful emissions reduction is certainly preventing or reducing traffic congestion in central urban areas and high trip-attraction zones. One of the congestion influence factors, i.e. (already low) traffic flow speed further reduction, is parking, that is search for a vacant on-street parking space. Since parking search is primarily due to the high occupancy of parking spaces, (better) parking management can affect its reduction. The paper presents the impact of parking time limit and parking price on the passenger cars’ total parking search (cruising for parking) time, as well as their related harmful gases emissions. A survey presented in this paper was carried out in the central urban area of Belgrade, the so-called red parking zone, in order to examine the passenger car users’ preference regarding the parking time limit and parking price variations. The potential benefits in the field of air pollution and fighting climate change due to the implementation of a balanced parking policy and on-street parking price were analysed in this paper.